The High Water Mark: Critical Pass

There’s a definitive moment in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
when Hunter S. Thompson sums up the end of the ’60s era profoundly,
making note of a “high-water mark” that can be seen from where the wave
of hippie platitudes rolled back into the gutter. If you set your gaze
north, you may be able to make out The High Water Mark (6800 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 286-6513),
a signal post of one of Portland’s newest frontiers of gentrification.
Brought to you by a former owner of Alleyway, this is a fledgling dive bar
at its core—a dimly lit cavern that remains a few broken couches and
Olympia signs short of being that place you outright ignore until a
friend recommends a pit stop as an almost-joke. A recent visit found a
tap list with kegs delivered to Portland bars by default: Rainier, Full
Sail, Double Mountain and Good Life on tap. The back room is outfitted
with a stage similar to those at punk-rock clubs like Slabtown and the
Know, but a chalkboard listing weekend events simply read “drink, drank,
drunk” for each night. A DJ spinning Godflesh and Black Sabbath
provided a sludgy backdrop for the handful of local punk kids who
weren’t outside chain-smoking. The High Water Mark may one day be the
nucleus of punk-rock critical mass Woodlawn needs to assert itself as
“the next thing” in NoPo, but it may require the decidedly un-punk
initiative of trying hard to get them in the door.

Correction: The print version of this article incorrectly stated that the High Water Mark and Alleyway were owned by the same people. High Water Mark Owner Eric Manfre is no longer affiliated with Alleyway.